HomeTech.fm - Episode 480 - TJ's Brilliant Install Review

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

On this week's show: SnapOne releases a new Traid amp, Ring releases a new camera that is ugly, LG now supports Dolby Atmos, Meross expands into matter with a presence sensor, TJ's fight with technology and tech support, a pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

this is the home tech podcast for friday may 3rd from sarasota florida i'm seth johnson from reynoldsburg ohio i'm tj huddles and from pickering ontario i'm gavin campbell and welcome to the home tech podcast podcast all about home animation home technology and um stickers yeah we're still doing stickers tj has been mailing out stickers supposedly i don't know no no so here's the thing i'm gonna mail all the stickers out at like one time and seth was giving me grief he's like well when's one time you know at one time is whenever i guess people stop sending us messages i don't know no you can't know i was probably gonna wait like like three weeks so i think we've we've done it for two weeks now. This will kind of be the third week.

So I'll probably start mailing them out next week. For those of you in Australia, won't get it for another five weeks though. Yeah, it happens. I mean, and it's funny too, because half of them are to overseas. So I honestly don't know how long it's going to take. I'm going to put a little message in there

that says when it was mailed out. And you have to respond to tell. Well, yeah, but I'm not going to be able to tell. There's going to be so much in these. And we talked about putting little ferrets in there for them too i'm gonna put an air tag in there yeah oh yeah everybody gets an air tag just not pennsylvania sorry yeah sorry pennsylvania but no here we'll send we'll send them out probably next week um so if you it's depending on when seth gets this out he probably won't get it out till next week so um i don't know if we'll get any more emails but we seem to get a lot of emails i think we're still gonna get more emails every time every

time we release a podcast or whenever seth really gets around to it it seems like we get a little flood of emails saying i want a sticker too you know like it's like people are listening to it i know it gives me a warm feeling that you know people can relate to my printer problems everybody loves stickers if there's anything i've learned is that if you give somebody free stickers they will take them no matter what they say and no matter their size or or shape or anything else they'll just free sticker i'm down have we found somebody in jordan yet or what was that country we were looking for jersey jersey hasn't checked in yet jersey we know you have a couple listeners five i'll let i'll let seth send that one out i'm gonna track down their ip addresses let's let's start to show up at their

houses it's gonna go into the uh uh yeah we're gonna put it in like a golden envelope and everything yeah it'll it'll, it'll be fancy. Jersey. Of course, there are two listeners in Jamaica so far. That's probably just me when we were down there a couple years ago. That's probably it. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, I guess here's the story from Pennsylvania.

They have passed a law criminalizing secret tracking using devices like air tags violations facing up to 90 days in violation violators facing up to 90 days in jail so if you are uh stalking somebody stop it is you could go to jail for that too I guess it's kind of the dumbest it's like such a weird thing right because like I mean I understand like U.S. law in like some capacity where like basically if it's not dictated somewhere then it's kind of up for interpretation but it's just like weird that like devices used for stalking wasn't outlawed before like the whole like air tag thing is like weird it's like wow we actually didn't realize that stalking with g like gps stuff was was an issue until these air tags came out but i've been

hearing about like those little boxes that like ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends put underneath their, you know, partner's cars for like years now, if not decades. So they've definitely existed for a while. So it's just weird that it specifically has to be called out now. Yeah, those little boxes were expensive. I bought a few of those. But the AirTags, you get them for a much better price, you know. But I've lost a lot of AirTags over the years because the people i'm stocking drive like three hours away and i ain't going that far never lost one of those little boxes though those boxes yeah they're a little expensive i

drive the three hours just to get it back it's like i'm done stocking you but can i have the box back well those boxes they don't tell the person that you're stocking that they uh that they're there so maybe that's why yeah yeah the air tag it's funny with my air tags i have air tags everywhere i think we're up to like a dozen maybe 18 of them so far um and it's funny like whenever i'm around an air tag that i own it'll like start beeping and like telling me it's like oh we found this air tag near you and i'm like that's mine you dummy and i can see it on the find my I can ping it right now with my phone. Yeah. And things like I'm putting a,

a link to a device in on Amazon. It's 1795, which I think is less than an air tag. It's a mini GPS tracker that will update every five seconds. Some of these even have like, what are those cell phone card things you can plug in? Yeah. This one has a subscription base. So yeah, it'll these even have cell phone card things you can plug in. This one has a subscription base.

It'll check in over cell phone. You can definitely be creepy with technology. That turns out. Thanks for the links. Oh, there's some for $9. We can go even cheaper. Why not get an ESP whatever. They require power. I'm not going to sit there rewiring

power into the car's battery just too long yeah i just want something that sticks on quickly underneath you know you know um actually there there's probably uh they they probably don't have them but uh what is that thing that amazon means sidewalk network right so you could use the sidewalk network yeah it wouldn't it would check in those the the ones that kind of like go around like this they don't check in every five seconds um but they you could probably you know get every down to like the minute granularity on that kind of thing but that would that would definitely do it so nice well it's definitely not gps or anything but have you guys used those tile trackers

no tile those things are the yeah like the tile before the air tags came out they were super popular but we bought some uh i think like a couple months ago those are the worst trackers i've ever used in my life so they don't use like any kind of network or anything they're just bluetooth but your phone can literally be on top of the tile tracker and it's like i don't know where it's at but we'll notify you if i find it and i'm like okay come on because it has to connect via bluetooth and it was not connecting and it doesn't work i think they used to now they have find my they have stuff that are built into apple find my now but yeah they used to have just the bluetooth versions um so yeah i'm looking at just about the crappy ones yeah yeah apple was about to get in trouble for having

find my lockdown they're like no tile everybody can use it so there's yeah here's one for 745 it's not the tile brand but basically all that the find my network is basically looking for is like you have this rolling id or whatever that gets looked up or decrypted or whatever and that device uh checks in to anybody's phone because your phone will walk by and see it there like anybody's phone could do it and then the phone checks in to anybody's phone, because your phone will walk by and see it there. Like, anybody's phone could do it. And then the phone checks in with the servers in the sky, and they figure out where things are.

Beep, beep, beep, beep. Yeah, I don't see anything. Oh, there's some tile stuff in here. I was trying to see if there's any, like, sidewalk network anything out now, but I guess not. It's still in development, but that seems like a really cool, I mean, not that use case, but it's a really cool network that nobody has really started to utilize other than ring i guess it's unfortunate because it it is nice anyway uh don't track people illegally in

pennsylvania or anywhere else for that matter don't don't be creepy yeah don't do that yeah if you do want to be creepy you can watch this on youtube no wait you can't watch this on youtube you can listen to us on youtube uh thank you for subscribing. If you are listening on YouTube, you're not creepy. You might be, who knows? You might be. We're not going to judge you. Exactly. You do you. And if you are on Mastodon and you want to follow us on Mastodon, we have our own little Mastodon server at hometech.social. I have Seth at, and TJ is TJ at again. And then Gavin is Gavin at hometech.social. We're all over there.

And there's also a, what is it? Hometech at hometech.social, I guess. I forget what I put that under because I never really go to it. It's a robot that posts show updates and that kind of thing. So whenever we publish a show, it'll get notified on there.

And yeah, that's going to wrap up that. We've got some headlines though. We've got some new products this week, a bunch of new products. So what do you say we jump to these home tech headlines? Let's do it. In the pro news space, because really nothing else is going on in there. Snap One is released, a Triad SA1 streaming amplifier featuring all metal chassis 2 by 200 watt power delivery and hdmi arc er compatibility as well as advanced integration and control 4 and moip systems kind

of a cool product i i noticed they didn't really mention the price on here i i think it's a pretty expensive product it also supports riff ryff is this anything you guys have heard of it's a pretty expensive product. It also supports Riff, R-Y-F-F. Is this anything you guys have heard of? It's like a 192 kilohertz sample rate, 24-bit. I have never heard of this. I have never heard of Riff either. But yeah, if you are in the Control 4 ecosystem, these do integrate really well with that.

And this is just a single zone amplifier. Triad's pretty good brand triads pretty good brand got pretty good brand recognition and some pretty good amplifier so check it out yeah it doesn't does not tell me a price on the website just says reserved so i feel like it's uh early days for it still um but this seems i mean honestly it seems like a good deal i was actually looking for an hdmi e-arc compatible amplifier for a set of uh sonans invisible speakers and that is actually harder to come by than you think it is for some reason um so i can see this being a seller if you just want like a basic amplifier with a tv or something like that um i want it with sonos but i don't think i'm gonna get that so yeah they're working i just

have to put a sonos port with it they're working on headphones for you oh yeah yeah nicole said she's ready for them still too just so you know we're a sonos headphones family if uh patrick spence is listening send more sonos uh so this riff thing uh i found a press release about control four and riff, introducing riff. So maybe it is Control 4's high-definition audio stuff. So 192.24 and includes MQA support. Also includes network-based audio synchronization. So this is what basically Control 4 is calling their platform

that they use to emulate what Sonos does, right? Because you can use wireless sync audio between different playing services like Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, Series XM, and it will play, the audio will play in different zones without, you know, delays or things like that. That's actually always worked really well in Control 4. Even, I don't want to say before Sonos, it was before I was using Sonos. Sonos was pretty popular overseas at the time and then kind of got more and more popular here in the States. And I didn't, I was a late comer to Sonos, but once I started using it, I'm like, oh yeah, this is why people

love this thing. But yeah, Control 4's like media streaming stuff always worked pretty well for me. They've definitely improved it over the years. Speaking of things improving, no wait, this is not an improvement. Ring has introduced a pan tilt indoor camera which allows for 360 rotation and 196 degree tilt for better monitoring it has a color hd video and motion alerts uh its camera includes a hardware kit kill switch and mechanical shutter because it's probably going to be used indoors uh which disables both video and audio feeds comes in a bunch of colors black white pink gray and off-white okay dirty maybe i don't know it's priced at 80 and pre-orders are open now

ships on may 30th um have you guys looked at this thing this is probably the single ugliest thing i've ever seen in my life i don't understand who thought this was a good design but we're here they were using hardware. That's they must have a lot of these cameras in the warehouse somewhere. They're like, what can we do with these? Clearly, they have more. I mean, there's a pink one here. They're printing, you know, they're not printing.

They're like making plastic cases for these things. I just don't know who's like, OK, we've got a round camera. We'll start there, like you're saying. Now we want to motorize the base and make it pan and tilt up and down let's make the base bigger than the camera right like i don't they could have made it the same size right and just made it maybe taller i don't know this it looks so bad it really looks bad yeah i feel like i would have just made it one piece just like make a shell around the whole thing and just make like a cylinder and wise has well wise has a little pan tilt zoom camera or pan tilt like it

turns and the the the camera module itself is kind of like a tilts up and down or whatever i don't know this is this is not it doesn't look good got some got some old inventory that got get rid of yeah that's what i was thinking like i was thinking they're trying to take some old inventory and just add parts onto it let's add this cover onto it let Let's add this base. You know, it's not a new product. It's like accessories for an old product in a way. You know, somebody is walking around the warehouse and they're like, what is over here in this corner? Going through the box and it's like, we have so many of these cameras, guys. What are we going to do with them? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It is a very ugly product. Some of the product shots are quite hilarious that they have this thing, you know, kind of just like sitting around mounted on walls.

I'm like, Oh no, this, this isn't something that I can see the use for something like this, right? Like if you had a pet, you wanted to monitor it and you already have a bunch of ring stuff. You just kind of want to keep an eye on them. Like it'd be good to plop one of these things down and use it. But, and the fact that it does have the uh you know the thing that you can close the little window shade i guess you can close around it when you're not using it or when you're home or whatever it does bring some peace of mind but i don't like that that's manual either though i had a little motor in there let me yeah just make it automatic that'd be nice from the app you know well if they made it made it a little motor it'd have another big blocky thing on top of it too i guess that's true and you could turn it on remotely i guess so

god their design language is so awful i mean for the indoor cameras especially like the doorbells have always looked pretty good at least closer to a doorbell than anybody else has been doing all right well let's move on here uh lg is uh doing an update, I guess. LG TVs will now support Dolby Atmos in the Apple Music app through a software update, providing an immersive sound surround experience for users on compatible TV sets. It's interesting. The feature is available on certain 2020 models and later with. So hopefully you get this update and you'll get more ads because you'll have to check the box that says send me ads LG. But you also get more ads because you'll have to check the box.

It says, send me ads LG, but you'll also get the update for Dolby Atmos for your TV and you'll have a fully functional Dolby Atmos TV. This is what everybody wants, right? Does this could be Dolby Atmos video? Can I see in Dolby Atmos? I mean,

this is like Apple music has been pushing their immersive thing for a long time. So I get, I mean, you really are going to need to have a compatible like you're not going to get an immersive system off of horrible TV speakers. You're going to have to have more. Yeah, you'll have to have a surround sound system. Right. So I don't know what Atmos requires you to have, but it will probably resample it into like if it's 5.1 or whatever to give you a better quality than just stereo though.

Yeah, I think this is just a play to add more words to their TVs. I mean, it's kind of like when NFTs were coming out. It's like, we've added NFTs to our TVs. And I was like, what does that mean? Yeah, you just need a sticker for your TV box.

And it's like, oh, now it'll be Atmos. There you go. And like, yeah, just something to sell more TVs. So yeah, there's a better story that when we, flatpanel.hd.com, it's like oh now it'll be atmos there you go and like yeah just something to sell more tvs so yeah you you there's a better story that will flat panels hd.com that says um you'll need to add a compatible soundbar or receiver to have the atmos signal decoded by hdmi typically um and it's not accessible directly from the apple music app um so it on on the smart tv so once they enable

this you'll actually have to go in and and and have a compatible soundbar system that does dolby atmos immersive sound or whatever um to to experience this uh this feature sounds like a one percenter feature less than one like yeah i don't Like, it is only in one app, like, I guess, because it's only in the Apple. They're the ones paying the licensing on it. So it's not like it's going to come to anything else. It's just in the Apple Music app, you'll get Dolby Atmos immersive music because Apple wants to pay for that. But you also have to have this other soundbar or surround sound system attached to it. Yay, I guess. Good job, LG. for that but you also have to have this other soundbar or surround sound system attached to it uh yay i guess good job lg i'm sure when you get this update you'll have you'll plug some more ads into everybody's tvs too all right well we got this uh in the hub today uh someone someone shared

this i think it was ty shared this uh story talking about miros uh they're expanding their matter range with a new smart presence sensor that includes presence detection motion detector detection and a light millimeter doppler radar technology and a pir sensor for faster response times matter compatible uh exposing all sensors to platforms like google amazon smart things apple home and home assistant uh the light sensor can also detect ambient light changes in real time interesting product uh we were talking about this quite a bit before the show and gavin i think i think you said this is a this is a me too product but i don't know it looks it looks nice it looks

cool they they obviously took a few ideas from the community to put this one together um i'm thinking of the very similar one but um yeah i think what matter right now we're kind of in a me too phase now so everybody's like converting over their motion sensors their contact sensors to matter say we have one too you know i think we're just going through that kind of phase me too matter yeah i mean it looks i mean physically it looks like a pretty nice device if the the rendering is actually correct there um i just i want one with battery power yes running a usb cable to all these sensors is awful i think i posted a picture of my my bedroom uh light switch the other day because richard sent me some engraved plates um and i took a picture and

somebody was like what's that cable going down from your wall i'm like uh it's my motion sensor richard's good at pointing out cables down walls like you never send them a picture if you can't handle the response yeah i i will point it out too i will judge you yeah i i agree like it's the millimeter wave sensor obviously it can't it will drain a battery so i'm looking for the day they they kind of make that much better much more battery efficient and some of the places i want to put these you can't have like a cord you know i might not have power there well you know the solution to this is just to get rid of all your current light switches and buy in a valley presence sensing switches whenever they come out. That's my next thing.

I want to get the Z-Wave with the millimeter wave built in, especially for the bathroom areas. That's my, I'm waiting for those. If you order now, they're only $75 American. I'll wait till they come out. Yeah. Well, they're going to be $99 or $89 when they come out. I'm good with that.

Yeah. Sorry, I was looking up how much the power draw is on these uh these millimeter wave things so i think that's like the only thing really that's new here we already have battery powered pir detectors so it must be like an inefficiency inside of this millimeter wave chip that everybody is using or started to use and maybe we just need more efficient millimeter wave chips or something to uh or sensors i guess to to get that down to where they can package it just like i mean i have a wireless motion over there that i mean i put the battery in that thing maybe two or three years ago i don't remember it's still working catches me in here every day yeah pir is different to millimeter waves so i was saying they've been refining them for like

40 years now so that's true that's true and millimeter wave has not been out that long so it's i guess it's a matter of time and we'll just have to wait um what we do need is is not not a bad i just i don't want the battery power i don't really care like i want like a wire powered version where it has a terminal on it or something like like a normal pir does right like a security pir that's not wireless has you know you could use hook up the little tiny security gauge wire was it 224 or something like that and power it with 12 volts uh that's that's all i i would like to see but nobody's doing that they're they're giving you these big bulky um five volt usb cables so oh there's a kitty

on our podcast today but you won't be able to see it on youtube nope sorry nope he's driving by to say hi uh and say don't take away my cables i love playing with cables we need cables all the links and topics discussed tonight can be found over in show notes at hometech.fm slash 480. All right, we got a pick of the week this week, and this is a fun one. Do you have trespassers on your lawn? Or just, you know, kids you don't like or something? I don't know.

There is a company called Eve who is releasing something called the Paint Can Eve, which is, quote, redefining smart security. And this is what it does. It's got AI face recognition because, you know, you can't actually have a camera or anything these days without AI face recognition in it. But not only will it recognize your face, but it will shoot paintballs at you too. This is the craziest thing I think I've ever seen. It's got an app integration. So if you see somebody on your property that shouldn't be there, you can just start shooting paintballs at them. I don't, we were trying to look through here to see like how many it had in its little hopper that it could start shooting at you. Uh, but yeah, this is wild. I think Jimmy posted this in our Slack channel today, uh, or, or this week. And this week and this is this is crazy i think greg pointed out that the

accuracy would be uh very bad with this thing because it doesn't have a long barrel but i mean some things are shooting at you it doesn't have to be accurate yeah it doesn't have to say yeah it's just to chase you away it's not to really like actually hit you just to scare you but it's huge this thing like i guess you could compare it to like a spaceman's helmet size big so i don't know where i would mount this i can totally see this being a thing but the example locations they give you in the kickstarter are not a thing i can tell you that right now at least not in america i guess uh one of them is home okay that's fine office you're gonna put one in your office okay probably not

warehouse that probably not either property uh yeah i guess everything is property if you're gonna put it somewhere in your shop in your restaurant uh in a bank and a villa so i'm not sure this is actually a real product i don't know it's gotten uh it had a decent backing wasn't it was already filled up there yeah 83 000 of the 12 000 goal has been pledged by 65 back some people want to uh to use this old paintball gun camera thing. Oh, I mean, I want to use it. I just don't think this is going to be a real thing. It comes with 50 paintballs, and you can get UV paint paintballs as an add-on.

It's got a laser, too. We have some cameras like this now. They're like PTZ cameras that have... We're starting to see these come out. I think they have lasers on them, like green like a red or green laser i don't remember laser beams um but then they also have a um i think unify unify unify uniview calls it active deterrence or something like that where they put like little red and blue lights that flash oh yeah those are annoying yeah i see them driving down the highway now red and blue lights that flash on them. Oh yeah, those are annoying. Yeah, I see them driving down the highway now with their blue lights or they flash

on like the side of the road or whatever. And then they also have like the bright LED lights that come on and for whatever reason, the people that walk around behind our office or whatever and the light turns on. We caught one guy the other day, he was like, he raised his hands. He was in trouble or something like that.

I don't know, it was funny. But yeah yeah there's all sorts of these like little add-ons that they're putting into cameras now that they can use to kind of like build in right on the camera on the edge uh of like active deterrence and having people like suddenly look up at whatever is flashing at them or makes noise because their speakers and stuff built into them now where they can say, get out of here. You're in the wrong spot. Or the most annoying one, the ring one

that they added like a couple months ago or a year ago or whatever, where it's like, you are being recorded. But it says that every time you pass in front of it. And they just want you to know, those are fun when you're working in somebody's house, going in and out of their house. Here's, I think that probably the only thing

I would buy from this company that's that's making this fake camera is the trespassing sign i was gonna say you should actually get that and it's your wall of shame yeah i mean i would just probably just print this myself or something but well why do that when you can spend 30 euros yeah exactly on a sign uh yeah it says warning this property is protected by paint cam like doesn't really tell you that you're gonna get shot but uh that's what i should say if you're reading this sign you're getting shot at probably you know i wonder if you get like a bigger hopper you get 15 co2 cartridges and 50 paintballs right but like what if you what if you need more

yeah so i think every one of them that you can buy they only get 50 paintballs right but like what if you what if you need more yeah so i think every one of them that you can buy they only get 50 paintballs so i feel like that's probably the capacity maybe 25 is the capacity because you're probably not going to shoot this thing a bunch right lies lies i will shoot it to film those we've gone into an hour or two and then you can buy a subscription which is even say what subscription's for but for 35 euros 100 paintballs for 35 euros 50 UV paintballs for 35 euros hmm

I mean they must know that we're just gonna shoot paintballs all day probably some special paintballs that are small maybe that's what the subscription is just unlimited paintballs I'm out of paintballs again send me more are you listening, HP? This is the ink subscription I would pay for.

Don't give them ideas. Yeah, you're right. They'll be buying this camera company in no time. Well, it's too funny. Who knows if it's real or not, but for... What are these things cost? Holy moly. Yeah, 2,000 euros. Yeah, I'm going to pass.

No, no, thank you. Did you think it was going to be cheap? I'm confused. It's an AI robot that shoots paintballs. Out of its face. At your face. This is wild. No, yeah, I don't know.

No, it's not going to happen. This is crazy. It comes with a one-year warranty for defects. And it's not even POE-powered. Come on. I think at minimum they could have done poe powered paintball cannons is is this blue does it have blue iris support yeah gavin we need to know how i bet you could integrate the paintball cannon with a blue i bet somebody

already has that's probably the problem well does it have an api does it have a rtsp stream you know like those are all questions. Like, did you read the FAQ? I did, but it's very, very minimal. Yep. Doesn't really say anything. Anyway, they are 600% overfunded. So there you go.

Maybe we will have a paintball. I just don't see these being, these are going to be a liability. Let's just say that. Somebody didn't think this through i don't see this actually coming to market all right well if you have any feedback questions comments great ideas for paintball cannons um send us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right project updates uh g, do you want to go

first? You, you have any projects you're, you've been busy at the house. I know you got house projects going on. Yeah. Yeah. Just it's yeah. House projects I've been working on, but you know, just, you know, public service announcement, you know, usually there's like four of these a week, but home assistant 2024.5 was released this week. So I've upgraded. Seth is probably going to upgrade live on the show. No issues. Honestly, it's not a very exciting update from the front end, but there's a lot of work going on in the back end and a lot of plug-in updates.

So they're plugging away. But you know what? We got a couple months. The last few months, we got some major updates. So it's been good. You know, I'm still, I'm okay with it, but you know, word of advice, just keep your home assistant up to date as it comes along. You know, um, it makes it easier to upgrade later on. What, what's a laugh for there? I'm updating right now well okay so i'm laughing because like i've been working on home assistant um and i was just looking through to see like what what features they have added in here so it's nothing exciting this week there's

there's some tweaks to like um the interface that they've made. Some improved audio for USB Home. Yeah, so a lot of backend stuff. Nothing flashy like the last couple releases. The new debug mode. All right, well, it's updated now. It was actually a pretty quick update. And oh, wait, it's found a new device. I do not know how to get rid of this message.

Every day I have a new device. I can dismiss it. It finds a new device i do not know how to get rid of this message every day i have a new device i can dismiss it it finds a new device i don't i don't get that much stuff you guys know i don't install that much so definitely not much coming under the coming into the system cj what have you been up to yeah so a couple i don't know it's probably been a month or two ago uh i got sent these brilliant switches uh they they They sent me the hardwired version, the 2GANG hardwired version, and then they sent me, I guess, the low voltage version, the 2GANG low voltage version. I actually got the low voltage version installed. I actually have it off the wall right now. I was going to bring it for a show and tell here. It's actually a pretty cool device. I actually like the way it mounts. So the mounting bracket installs on the wall, and then you slide the

tablet thing on to the bracket, which makes it super easy to install. If you've installed like touchscreens in the past, they're usually connected with some kind of wire. And then as like you're putting it on the wall or taking it off the wall, have to mess with the wire and that's always annoying so it's kind of a good thing they uh they fix that issue with that um and it just connects via usb so realistically you could just extend the wire to wherever you want and then you know run into like a rack or into a different room or something like that and just you just snip the wire and extend it so nice that's kind of nice for installation purposes um i got it installed i i don't have too many devices that actually works with the integration list actually has quite a bit of stuff um but i only have lutron sonos and lifex that i can control with it um everything seemed to work pretty easily and actually getting

the lifex or the uh the brilliant switch set up initially was actually really easy. Um, if you followed me on threads recently, you know that I've not been having a good week with technology. And so it was nice to have something to, something that just worked right out of the box. It was kind of amazing. Nice.

Nice. Um, have you got, have you guys seen these at all? Those the brilliant switches, have you used it, played with it or anything like that no i have not no these are the they're you held it up and flashed it pretty quickly so i didn't really get to take a look at it yeah it's like the it's like the half touch screen half switch product um and i forget it

was bought by somebody i forget who it was bought by though um it's residio residio bought it didn't they maybe i'll go check right now but didn't they have a um lower cost product that came out recently like for light switches yeah they had like a regular like dimmer switch i think it's like 80 or something uh brilliant smart dimmer switch 70 that one doesn't look too bad but honestly the uh the the traditional brilliant switch is kind of cool i didn't realize it actually had an intercom and camera built into this wow and so you can actually uh look into your room or wherever you've installed that the camera quality isn't the best i would think it's like 480p or 720p um but it's like enough to like look in or something i don't know how many light switches actually have a camera built into them.

And it actually has an intercom too. So you can use your app to actually talk back and forth with the light switch as well. And so I could see this being an alternative to like the whole house intercoms that people used to install everywhere. Yeah. And the camera thing is kind of weird though. Like I would probably want it without the camera. Yeah.

I feel like there's a way to disable that. But yeah, the camera thing is a little weird because if you install it in your bedroom or something, it's just a camera in your bedroom all the time. Well, we have no eyeballs in the house policy. So yeah, it wouldn't... You leave your eyeballs outside whenever you come in. Exactly, you got to take them off of the door.

And just take them right out. It's like a Beetlejuice at my house. Just take it off your shoes. Yeah. No, but one thing i can't stop thinking about though is i know they're not going to do it but i think if they open this thing up to home assistant i think and just like hubs in general like smart things and everything else i think they would sell a ton because i always see people asking about touch screens and tablets that they can mount on their wall. And nobody really offers like a good solution for that.

And I think this is a decent enough solution, especially the low voltage version, where you can just basically mount it wherever you want. You don't have to have an existing power or two-gang switch or anything like that. And you can mount it wherever you want, and that would give you good smart home control. So I think if they open that up, i think it'd be really popular for that um because it is overall a very nice device yeah yeah i i'd not see where they were bought by anybody that they may have had investments or something like that but maybe i made that up um i'm i'm i think they're still just kind of doing their own thing right now it's kind of nice maybe i just saw them

adi and i was confused and i was like well adi obviously bought them residio had a they have a partnership with residio for probably selling within the stores or something that or maybe integrating with the residio line of stuff too yeah well it is uh compatible with residio total connect i think they said so that makes sense actually i know there's some kind of weird partnership because i've seen them at adi and it's kind of weird to see that kind of stuff at ADI. Yeah, I mean, they're moving. They've got their own kind of like ecosystem set up around this.

So I guess good for them. There's not very many of these left. These little smaller companies that have done something well and just kind of keep plugging away. Yeah, and I like the consistency of it, right? Because I have the hardwired version and i like the consistency of it right because i have the the hardwired version and i have the low voltage version and they look very similar

obviously different depths and all that good stuff because they are different products but they look very similar to each other and that's kind of nice for consistency's sake usually when you get into these kind of devices they the different uh technologies they look a little different but these don't have that problem it works with smart things why wouldn't they why wouldn't they start working on a uh a home assistant thing it'd be nice right yeah i think i think it'd be a big seller in the home assistant crowd because they're always looking for touchscreens i don't know like i think the home assistant crowd likes cheap touchscreens so i'm not sure maybe it's not worth your time yeah uh but i mean if your option is four hundred dollars or something you have to cobble off the shelf,

maybe you'll choose the $400 option. I would, every time probably. It's not gonna happen. I think that's most people, right? I think most people are gonna be like that because they don't wanna just hack something together and throw it in their living room. Yeah, especially something that hooks up to a mains power

and could cause a fire. Yeah, and that's what, this usb so i mean you know you just run into any usb plug and you're good to go right and easily cut it and all that good stuff extend it so i think it's a good idea yeah i just wish you didn't have the camera in there everything else i like yeah i need to i don't see like a physical turn off for the camera but well i say everything else i like i don't like the i'm not a fan of little up and down switchy thing um not sure about that but i i made that up there is a physical turn off like the, I'm not a fan of the little up and down switchy thing. I'm not sure about that. I made that up. There is a

physical turn off for the camera. I'm looking at it right now. Oh, okay. So it's got a little slide. It's a little manual slide. You just slide it over and it covers the camera. No eyeballs. Exciting. That's right. And then I've, oh my gosh, this week has not

been fun with technology. I spent the past like five days and I don't even know how many hours fixing my LIFX pathlights, these things that I was so excited to buy. And I was like, I'm going to buy these things. They're going to be great. And I knew in the back of my head, I was like, I'm going to regret this purchase eventually, but they look fun and I'm all about fun. So I bought them. Um, I connected them originally, uh, to home assistant via matter. So I just like, I opened a home assistant, I added a matter device, I scanned the code,

it added and everything was good. Right. And then I eventually had a problem and I had to update it with the life X app, which that was fine. fine um and then it lost the matter network via home assistant and it just stopped working but the lifex app still worked fine and so i reached out to the support and they're like hey does the app work you know does the app work and i was like yep works fine everything turns on and off i can change colors and everything and they were like okay that's pretty much it you're good to go and i was like well no guys like it's it's matter compatible and it's not working with my matter stuff i need it to work with my matter stuff and i waited like it's been like two or three days i don't know how long honestly and so i just gave up and i just factor reset them which then of course caused more issues because I couldn't get it connected to Wi-Fi for

some reason. So in my house, I have a couple of different Wi-Fi networks going on. I have our main Wi-Fi, which is just, you know, 2.4 and 5 gigahertz mixed together. You know, I don't really care about that one. It's just what everybody connects to. I have a, uh, another Wi-Fi network. Um, this is going to get bleeped out, I guess, but it's called a shitty Wi-Fi. And it's just that's where all my 2.4 gigahertz only devices connect to, right? And that's like my Aquara FP2 sensors, they only connect to 2.4. And so I got those connected to that network, and they work fine. Well, I tried to connect the LIFX lights to that one, because it does require a 2.4 gigahertz network only and it wouldn't work for some reason and i spent countless hours i feel like i spent like eight

hours on these stupid lights and i contacted lifex and they're like well you have an open ticket for this going on and so we're not gonna be able to help you and i was like i know but this is like a different issue can you help me with this issue and they're like no we can't really do anything because it's like the same problem and i was like it's not the same problem though that's what i'm trying to tell you it's like a different problem and so like they tried to help me and they couldn't figure it out my solution was to just create a separate ssid for my front yard i have an access point in the front yard i created a separate network for just my front yard and i named it even shittier wi-fi and it worked instantly yep it probably needed to you probably have more do you have one more

than one access point i have three all together yeah so it's confused as to which one to connect to and it never connects to the right one and so therefore i guess so but even like the even the other one isn't that far away from it so So, I mean, realistically, it should have been fine. And I had it set up over Matter, which uses Wi-Fi, and that still worked. So, I'm not really sure what was going on there, but it works fine now. Networking is the problem. After I spent like 12 hours on it. So, that's my life ex-woes.

It sounds like you bought printers for your front yard. God. And it's like, and I was like, like man i don't even want to buy more now because it's like yeah they work fine now but it's like uh so i want to buy more i don't think i don't want to buy more so i decided to go ahead and double down this week and i bought more technology and i i bought a robot lawnmower i'm joining the ranks of seth over here one of us one of us we just need to get gavin on the on the bandwagon now yes where's where's rose's number so i can send her one i'm the one that won i i wanted it the most but man i did like for my yard i need a more

expensive one yeah and to to be fair you probably have a bigger you probably have a bigger yard than I do, too. So I'm just being lazy. Yeah. And I have some inclines. So because of the steepness of some of those inclines, I'll have to get a more expensive one that can handle them. Yeah, you have to buy the Luba or whatever. Yeah. I'm jealous.

So jealous. I bought the Segway i110N. This is their second newest one they came out with. I think this one's good for a quarter of an acre. The reason I bought it is because it uses the RTK vision, which does not need the boundary wire to like operate, which I'm all about, right? Because I have this beautiful fenced in yard that we just completed.

And I just want the robot lawnmower to go everywhere within the fence. It's not going to go outside the fence. I'll still cut the front yard. I'm fine with that, but it just stays in the backyard. So I get it Friday. I spent more money than I was expecting to spend, but not really. I was expecting to spend between $500 and $1,000 on a used Husqvarna robot lawnmower,

so I just stepped up to like 1400 don't tell the cfo she's behind you i just looked she's not we're good i know that you see when i when i first looked at the lawnmowers they're all in the three thousand dollar range for a good one right but you know what they've come down significantly in price. In my neighborhood, I need to make sure that they have theft detection and, you know, you know, insurance if someone steals it, because I just have a feeling someone's going to drive up and just grab the

thing. That's where you need the paintball camera. Deal. Can they make an accessory to mount onto the robot lawnmower like a paintball cannon? Oh yeah. Now we're talking. No, but that's why I'm not...

I just don't care about the front yard as much, and the front yard doesn't really take me that long. But it's the backyard that I actually walk around and enjoy. It's like I just want that to be mowed all the time. And so I'm also not putting it out front, though, because I don't want it stolen. Or just running the road and somebody runs it over. Yeah. I can't imagine coming home and seeing my $1,400 robot lawnmower just ran over. No good.

So the problem is people will steal it, realize it doesn't work for them, and they won't return it. At least return it. Like, if you stole it and realized it didn't work, at least return it so it can continue mowing. But they won't even return it. They'll just throw it in the garbage. That's one thing I'm afraid. Where Seth lives, he can leave Halloween candy out

and they'll take one piece. Yeah, they sit there and eat the piece and watch the mower run around in the yard. Yeah. In our neighborhood, we leave that Halloween candy bowl out and you're short one bowl and all the candy. And they took your window and your car yeah you know and they leave a note like that's all we're coming back for your

copper tomorrow yeah so i gotta move that's why you're improving the house right now so it's a resale value yeah i gotta move to a nicer neighborhood that's too good too good well yeah somebody comes up with a that's what the next kickstarter we'll be covering is is a as a lawnmower with the little hood mounted uh paintball cannon built into it or a taser that'd be cool lasers taser. Yeah. So that's exciting. Get the I-110. That's coming in and you're going to get it Friday, you said. Yes. So originally it said May 12th through the 19th.

And then updated and was like, it'll be here Saturday. And I looked at it today and it was like, it'll be here Friday. I was like, yeah, come here tomorrow. Because it's only like, I think it's like an hour and a half away right now so realistically it could show up tomorrow man and here i am still waiting on my 3d printer that i ordered like two three months ago it's probably delivered last week but somebody stole it it actually showed up last week and rose just's like, he doesn't need this. It's a marketplace. Not until his other projects are done. He has enough printer problems as it is.

Oh, God. I'm in trouble. What do you got going on, Seth? I have a ratio upgrade coming. I'm swapping out my old beehive for a four- beehive that only operates three zones for an eight zone ratio. The office is sending one because I do development on ratio, but I've never had one. So it's kind of always been like a remote thing or kind of VPN and,

and work, work on it here. So they were swapping stuff out at the office and they're like, Hey, you want this old ratio? And I'm like, yeah, send it to me.

So now I've got, I'll have, what, eight zones? So I've got five left to fill up my pool with. So maybe I can figure out how to do that. I need a pool first. And the pipes that go to the pool. Don't you live, like, by a lake or something or a river? It's a creek. Here's that.

No. No. Perfect. That's a body of water yeah there's it's technically water uh i'm not sure what grows i mean florida is very famous for the what is it the brain eating uh amoebas or whatever oh yeah yeah there's uncle swimming in florida water the alligators will eat you if you don't get that you'll get some kind of staph infection that will eat your brain so yeah florida water is bad either way you will die yes every it's out to kill you here we're just it's like australia but it's my favorite just go to the theme parks they're okay it's mostly safe all right wait are they because i thought they shut down that one from disney because the brain eating disease it probably probably yeah and then okay so i started i started working on uh um my shelly issue last week i talked about it

um about being threatened with uh with a civil divorce court over these shelly lights somebody couldn't turn off and uh since i only had the app on my phone i was like well i'm not gonna install another app on my waste phone. I need to get it back into the control for system and working. And there's a couple of cell drivers, but they don't do exactly what I want them to do. And Home Assistant kind of does exactly what I want it to do. But there's no integration between control for and and and Home Assistant. Until now, I have made a control for that's F O R assistant driver.

And, uh, so if you want, I may, I'm going to come out with it. I'm going to like finish this off and make it cause the API for home assistance, actually nice Gavin. Thank you. That you can do like anything on home assistant, which is, is kind of crazy. Um, basically API that you use for development, a home assistant is kind of like, it's weird coming from like control for World or RTI or like all the professional spaces, even Crestron for that matter.

Like the way they have developed over time, because they're older products, they have a software application you run, typically in Windows, that you use to create a configuration file that is compiled or pushed over to the controller. And it runs on the controller off that configuration that you build with whatever software like there's no apis for that that's all

like private behind the scene apis for those control systems or it takes literally a usb cable and what was it urc used to do like windows mobile drivers or something you'd have to transfer the configuration over it was it was awful. With Home Assistant, I mean, all of the stuff that you can do through their front-end interface that you use, Gavin, you can do through the API too. So if you want to look at your configuration for Home Assistant, you can just open that up and it's right there. It's printed out right in their API. You can edit things. You can edit things. You can add devices like the, the, the device page where I was just kind of joking a

minute ago about like what devices were discovered and how, you know, you can add them in, you can just add them in. Like it gives you the ability to do that. So that's like, that's the backend API that the front end of home assistant sits on top of that we all know and love and, and yamble about. So it's kind of nice to like actually get down into the nuts and bolts of things. I guess you can do that through the front end. I've never been able to like figure that out very well, but the backend made a lot more sense to me because it's kind of a language that I speak. And, uh, yeah, I, I was able to, uh, get my lights working with it, uh, exactly how I wanted to. I've got all three lights switching on and off at the same time with a push button. I sent you guys a video on that of me pressing a button on my wall and it turns on and off the lights.

And actually, since it's integrated right with Control 4, it sends a driver that's in the Control 4 system that kind of communicates various ways over to the home assistant and like everything stays in sync too so like it's kind of nice it's two-way driver uh if the the shelly lights turn on the little light on the control four keypad turns on so everything stays in sync um and home assistant has a decent thing so i'm like this uh there's some like rgb lights and things not just like on and off like there's dimming and rgb wrgb integrations you can do with um home assistant so i'll i'll kind of start to kick around with that because it's basically it's the same like the way this all these homeless home automation platforms are structured um there's only so many ways you can do things and it's all kind of like the same, right? So what home assistants calls one thing, like services, I guess, is kind of like what

control four would call maybe a proxy or a protocol or something. And you're sending more of a proxy, I guess, because you're sending the messages through those services down through home assistants back into the device. And it works almost the same way on control four. So the message is almost the same. If know both of them you can bridge them together so i'm going to keep working on it it's it seems like it's going to be a fun little project now i'll probably i'll probably publish this out um on it but yeah it works pretty well what's cool about it is it can be two-way instant you know there's there's plenty of ways to to to bridge the two things together uh one of the fun things i found

was there was a um there's a since you can do anything from home assistant that's in their api you can actually tell if there's an update that's needed so on a keypad i turned a little yellow light on if it needs an update and i press it or red i guess and then i press it it turns yellow while it's updating and then when it's green it's not there's no update it's needed so wow that's fancy i can update anytime just press the button on the wall done can you hit that button for me please yeah uh so yeah i don't know there's a there's a lot there the home assistant uh av apis leave a lot to be desired they're very basic um like more in line with what you would use for like a streaming media stuff control for elon definitely have a leg up when it comes to that but that's not what home assistant

really is focused on or designed for so i can't hold that against them but um it's if you wanted to like i i guess this is my way of saying, I'm probably not going to touch that until last, like doing like AV integrations and like Zolan integrations and media player integrations. I'm probably not going to do that until last. But it can be done, though. That's kind of nice.

That is pretty cool, Seth. That sounds more productive than me, so. You do listen to me when I talk. That's what I got out of this. It just took, what, two years or something yeah i knew you'd come around i don't know like this little platform can do a little bit more than uh than randomly tell me if my printer is out of paper or not i mean this this is one way that control four is going to get some printer integrations because after i do lights i'm definitely doing printers like i if i'm i'm is going to get some printer integrations. Cause after I do lights, I'm definitely doing printers. Like I, if I'm,

I'm definitely going to integrate printer paper quantities for some reason. I don't know why anybody would want that, but there you go. Printers out of toner flashlights done. Anyway, that's my control for assistant driver. And I was just like like what's not a copyright violation that control we're getting angry about so don't worry we'll still get sued yeah probably

they'll be angry about it for some reason they're they're busy with other things right now so maybe they'll just be distracted yeah it's like now they have to be quiet about things i think they have other reasons to be mad at you though so oh that reminds me it's time to go rename the facebook group oh yeah it's been 29 days you should mess up the name one more time you should name it control five just oh i slipped i can't for another i better not record this this is gonna be used in the legal proceedings control s dollar sign. Rename it Josh AI. Whoops. Oh man. Yep.

I better go rename it. I'll do that. Nah. Someone I remember to go on Facebook. All right. I think that's going to wrap up this week. We do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show and listens,

but especially those are able to financially support through our patron a big thank you to everyone who supports the show and listens, but especially those who are able to financially support through our patron page. If you don't know about the patron page, head on over to hometech.fm

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and talk and see all these fun stories that we talked about, you know, the paint paintball gun there's some other funny things that were happening today and i was trying to follow along but not having a good day and i'm like i'm kind of i'm kind of grumpy kind of grumpy but yeah i think like you guys were talking about the what was the little monitor thing the david got the s thing. The little monitor home. Oh, yeah. S3 box. Yeah.

For the local voice assistant. That's pretty cool looking. It's adorable looking. I got to admit. That looks like a fun little piece of kit to have. I have one of these awful UniFi switch things. I don't know. Have you ever seen one of these?

Oh, yeah. Those things are expensive. Are they? I think so. I think it was several hundred dollars. Well, it's awful. Don ever seen one of these? Oh, yeah. Those things are expensive. Are they? I think so. I think it was several hundred dollars. Well, it's awful. Don't buy one. Yeah.

Well, I figured it would be. It runs Home Assistant or the Washington Post, I guess. That's the Ubiquiti one? Yeah. Yeah. Is that for their Protect lineup or something else? It's for their signage thing. Oh, yeah.

I forgot they had that. I don't know. I installed Firefox on it because i was tired of their app crashing all the time i guess this one was a advanced one of the when they were doing the pre-launch products and it's a six inch screen and it's i don't know i guess the new ones are better but they have like 20 inch screens now and i don't want a 20 inch screen yeah they have the current one is a 21.5 inch uh poe touch screen uh but it's 700 well this one's poe right so it's like it's poe back there's a little mount kit that goes on it they got all

that extremely right the hardware not so much like it's yeah it's a little underpowered for what it needs to be um i liked to use it for the Protect app, but it would always crash. And I have one of those horrible $10 Amazon tablets sitting over here that works a little bit better and crashes a little bit less than Ubiquiti's own product with their own app running on it. So from what I was reading on the forums, there's really no support on them because they were never officially released. And people say they're probably not getting any updates anymore. So I put Firefox on it and loaded Home Assistant while I was working on the control four driver so I could see the lights turn on and off in the other room. I forgot. That's another project I guess I did. It's part of, I'll start posting more in our hub

if you're in there and you'll see some of the fun stuff i'm working on looks like there's more robot mower news in there now geez what's going on now it's just all robot lawnmowers now man and you want you know what i want to know the best thing seth nobody even has to give us money to get stickers sent to them all you have to do is send us your address at feedback at home tech.fm and I'll mail you stickers at some point. Who knows when it'll happen. Maybe it'll happen

before I go to Florida and see Seth in person. Yeah, he's going to bring me stamps. All right. Well, if you want to help out but can't support financially, we'd just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes

or positive rating the podcast app of your choice to help people find the show that's going to wrap up another week of news here on home tech everybody have a great

weekend and we will see you next week till next time take care and done what uh what title are we going to rip off from resi week this week And done. What title are we going to rip off from Resley Week this week? I saw that, but what else were we going to say?